An ongoing blog series about Agile and Leadership

“Whoa! I don’t enable excuses” you may be thinking. “I don’t even accept them” may be your follow up thought. You’ve heard the old saying ‘you reap what you sow’. The organizational structure currently in place is the root cause of the behavior and the results you are experiencing.

Let’s explore one of the more popular examples of this. As a leader you may lack the ability to Focus, one of the Scrum values. Instead of weighing the pros and cons or trusting an empowered Product Owner to make these decisions and order the work, you declare “It’s All Priority!”.

The reality of what you said is there is no priority. Priority means one thing is before something else. Which means people who have this lack of direction now are in a position of having to guess. Can you feel your credibility as a leader diminishing?

Since everything is priority- spread the people doing the work across all these items and don't allow them to Focus and get work to Done. And call them projects or tasks or teams and tell people they are 25% “allocated” to this thing, another 15% to that thing, etc. Decades old data which continues to be upheld proves this isn't effective and won't achieve faster results. In fact, it’s slower because of the context switching that people are experiencing. They need to remember where they left off on one project or task to ramp back up and get back to work on that. Only to get interrupted or told they should be focusing on a different project or task. One of the original data sets is provided here:

How credible do you feel knowing your employees not only have this data, they live it every day in your organization? The reality is you have handed every single person that is time-sliced a built-in excuse.

You ask them for information on project 1 and they tell you “Oh let me get that for you in a minute, I’ve been busy on project 2”. You ask someone for status on project 2 and they tell you they have been busy with projects 3 and 4. Who knows what is happening? With this chaotic approach to doing work there is zero transparency and a bunch of ready made excuses.

Understand why your credibility as an “Agile Leader” is pretty low and ready to fix it? The good news is it takes only 2 things:  dedicate teams and order their work.

That’s it. 

Want No Excuses and higher visibility into results? Never want to use the words Agile or Scrum again? No problem. Bring work to the team in a force-ranked order. That means something is #1. Then something else is next. This way there are NO EXCUSES. Work is either done or it’s not done and we focus on removing/working through the impediments to getting it to done. Yes, Agile approaches such as Scrum enable getting work done but only if used as directed. If you don’t make the structural changes required, the behavior doesn't change and it’s excuse time.

Want to be coached on how to become a credible Agile Leader? Contact us at: info@coleadteam.com